The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

If you’re thinking of visiting Sydney in the near future, a few tips that may help: the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee is breathtaking; the Manly ferry affords wonderful views of the harbour and beyond; and the chicken fricassée at Restaurant Hubert is outstanding. Oh, and don’t trust Scruffy Murphy’s if it tells you it’s got the football on. That’s how we ended up on the corner of Goulburn Street at 2.15am one Monday morning, talking to a man through a wooden shuttered door.

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“But your website advertised it.”

“We’re shut, mate.”

So, Sydney: wonderful place. Scruffy Murphy’s: big fibbers. Anyway, a taxi driver told my pal about a place in Surry Hills that might show it. So we rerouted to the Madison Hotel, where it promised you could watch the football and was actually sincere. Open 24 hours, the Madison, if you feel the need. Not the most salubrious venue, mind. If you’re still going at 4am on Monday morning in Sydney, chances are you started Saturday. There used to be a Monday-night club in London called Fubar. It stood for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, because if you were still out from the weekend come Monday, you most certainly were. The Madison worked on the Fubar principle, apart from one old bloke, the newly arrived party of two from Scruffy Murphy’s and some construction workers on a break. Occasionally, night owls would stagger in from the pokie machines next door to get another drink, announce themselves to be huge Arsenal fans, blink uncomprehendingly at the screen for two minutes then stagger out again. Someone’s girlfriend seemed in permanent need of a light or some conversation, which was going to get some poor sod in trouble sooner or later, judging by the state of her boyfriend. So we stayed focused on the TVs showing the game. And all the time I was thinking, “I used to be able to do this from my hotel bed.”

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And you could in Australia. Every game, every weekend. As someone who covers The Ashes and makes occasional dashes to catch Andy Murray in an Australian Open final, it came in very handy. You’d arrive, ragged with jet lag but unable to sleep, and be kept company through the night by our own dear Premier League. Three games live, the rest on delay. It was the same wherever you went. I’ve watched Arsenal in Ahmedabad and Charlton in Karachi, but slowly the football is disappearing from the screens. The cricket correspondents who expected to be able to follow their teams on the last winter visit to India, discovered the rights were now owned by a HD-only channel and HD televisions were not in great supply. And Premier League football in Australia is now in the hands of telco Optus. I stay in reasonable hotels. None of them had Optus. It’s probably like BT Sport.

Some clubs are beginning to worry about the impact of this commercial short-termism on their global audience

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The Premier League has been good for Optus, because in the first six months of its three-year deal it reported 201,000 new customers, its biggest improvement in six years. Telstra, a rival, added only 79,000 in the same time period. Yet coverage and visibility of the Premier League is in decline. In Optus’ first year, using November 2016 as a sample month, press reports on Premier League football fell by 29 per cent. If people are not watching it, they’re not talking about it, and if people aren’t talking about a subject, the press loses interest. The Premier League sold to the highest bidder – the deal is reportedly worth £100 million – but subscribers are tired of paying across so many formats. The #OptusEPL hashtag has been matched by another: #OptusOut. Equally, Optus will not reveal their viewing figures for Premier League football, which is never a good sign.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, some clubs are beginning to worry about the impact of this commercial short-termism on their global audience and wish to reopen discussion on the dreaded 39th game. Richard Scudamore, the Premier League executive chairman, claims still to have the scars from that particular battle. Yet some powerful clubs reportedly remain in favour, not least Manchester City, who may be owned in Abu Dhabi but have a Spanish hierarchy led by CEO Ferran Soriano. He knows that La Liga are already exploring the idea of games abroad, which would see Real Madrid and Barcelona included in the package. The Italian Super Cup – Italy’s equivalent of the Community Shield – was first played abroad in 1993 and has travelled on eight occasions since. The 2017 edition, in Rome, was the first one to take place at home since 2013. The same with France’s Trophée Des Champions, last played at a domestic stadium in 2008 and since taken to four continents.

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England could hire out the Community Shield, which is not greatly loved by the supporters of the major teams that usually get there, but a bona fide league programme abroad, one weekend in which all Premier League clubs travel to five or ten of the highest-bidding venues, is viewed as the Holy Grail of export and consumer awareness. That this would corrupt the league, by giving one team an extra fixture against Manchester City and another an additional match with Stoke, is never the concern of the money men. Scudamore hasn’t actually gone off the idea, either – he just doesn’t fancy the backlash a second time, with fans and the media almost universally hostile. Maybe he would be more amenable if the clubs take the heat. Maybe the 39th game will be like unpopular plans for building development: resubmitted and resubmitted until all the campaigners are so exhausted that one day they slip through.

There is, of course, a third way, a way to continue growing the Premier League globally without expecting half of Manchester to decamp to Singapore or adding a random factor to the competition even more pronounced than the refereeing of Bobby Madley. They could let people watch it. They could sell the rights not necessarily to the highest bidder but to a very high bidder who also has the reach to take the game into most homes. That way, the fans would not be at the mercy of executives or the misleading claims of Scruffy Murphy’s. If you’ve ever been on Goulburn Street at 2am, you’d understand.